Can I Program Picaxe if Supply Voltage is only 3 Volts ?

[hal8000]

Currently I'm running a Picaxe 18M2 from the 3.3V supply of my Raspberry Pi.

The Picaxe was disconnected from the Pi and powered from 5Volts and I used
the AXE027 lead to program the Picaxe.


Is it safe to program the Picaxe if it was connected to the Raspberry Pi and
being powered only on 3.3Volts ?

I cabnt find this on any of the Picaxe Manuals.
I downloaded the datasheet from Microchip for the PIC16F1847 (18M2) and according
to the electrical spec on Page 345:

Voltage on Pins with Respect to Vss:
16F1847 -0.3 to 6.5V
16LF1847 -0.3V to 4V


The answer looks as though its possible but I'll wait for verification.
Thanks in advance, sorry if this has been asked before

 

[SAborn]

Give it a go, it cant hurt anything and will either work or it wont.
From my experience it should work, I used 3.3v for Nokia displays in the past and was able to download to the chip.

 

[hippy]

It should be possible to program PICAXE chips at any supported supply voltage. We do this all the time during development, often running and programming the PICAXE below 5V. The 22K current limiting resistor protects the download Serial In pin from higher voltages on the programming cable.

 

[Hemi345]

From my experience, programming works fine down to 2.7V. I've had issues programming at 2.5V but that might have been a design issue with my PCB... haven't had time to try the same PCB at 2.7 or 3.3V to see if the problem disappears at a slightly higher voltage.

 

[AllyCat]

Hi,

Yes, I've successfully programmed M2s at a Vdd below 2 volts. The only problem which I initially ecountered was an inadequate "RS232" serial output voltage level that caused the "verification" process to fail below about 2 volts. So I devised a simple one-transistor interface, documented in this finsihed project.

Cheers, Alan.